The GENES Blog (GEnealogy News and EventS): Top stories concerning ancestral research in Britain, Ireland, and their diasporas, from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit The GENES Blog if you do so. To contact me please email chrismpaton @ outlook.com.

Pages

Wednesday, 29 August 2012

Scots Origins loses IGI interface

The Scots Origins website at www.origins.net/sowelcome.aspx continues to suffer the death of a thousand cuts. Once the main platform for online access to Scottish censuses, working in partnership with the Scottish Government, it lost the contract to continue the service many years ago to Brightsolid, which formed ScotlandsPeople as a replacement service. A look-up service was introduced in its place on Scots Origins, for records to be consulted at the GROS in Edinburgh, which soon became redundant as the pace of digitisation increased. One thing the site did retain, however, was a useful free tool to access the baptism and marriage records of the old International Genealogical Index at parish level, rather than at county level (as used to be the case on the old FamilySearch site). Sadly, this now seems to have gone to the great genealogical graveyard in the sky also.

Where before there were two search interfaces to the IGI, there is now a single link inviting people to 'Please click here to go to the Family Search site'. A message is then given, stating 'We hope to have an integrated search facility available on the Scots Origins site again very shortly'.

The last tool still on the site is one that allows you to try to locate a place name if you can only make part of it out.

1 comment:

Long may they continue to wither on the vine ... I've never liked this lot as they've always struck me as one of the worst examples out there of an organization interested in extracting the most amount of money for fairly limited information inadequately indexed.

At least Brightsolid and Ancestry play with a square bat and have data worth the dosh. Origins are best avoided.